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Friday, December 21, 2012

In case you missed it, here is Alex Grant's article Is America Great? that appeared in the December 20th edition of the Longmeadow News (with permission of the author and thanks to the Longmeadow News). It reflects sentiments that many of us have after last week's tragedy.____________________________________________________________

In the wake of the Newtown shootings, I am beginning to
wonder, for the first time in my life, whether America can be a great
country.In my lifespan, we have endured
the tragedy of Vietnam, the shame of Watergate, the prospect of nuclear
annihilation by the Soviet Union, the shock of the 9/11 attacks, and three wars
in the Middle East.Through it all, I
have remained steadfast that we are, as our Puritan forebear John Winthrop
said, a "city upon a hill."I
have read the story of our nation as the history of a people called to a higher
purpose, as expressed in the Mayflower Compact, the Constitution, and in our
current form of government.

American
courage and ingenuity, displayed for generations, from the War of Independence
to World War II to the Cold War, have been placed in service to the rest of the
world and to ourselves.I have always
thought that the arc of our history bends upward, and it lends credence to the
idea of the perfectibility of mankind.I
question all of that now.

Whatever
aspirations we may have for shared prosperity, the health and happiness of our
people, or even social justice, none of them matter so long as small children
can be slaughtered en masse and so long as the survivors and the rest of
society must live in apprehension, and with the knowledge, that such a mass
killing will happen again.When the
Declaration of Independence said that we are all endowed with the unalienable
rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," it was no
mistake that "Life" came first.

Life is
first because everything else flows from it.The society we hope to build in the coming years, however much we
succeed in our aims, will be of no use to the Newtown children lying in the
morgue.Freedom and material prosperity
count for nothing to the dead.If we
cannot provide peace and security in our cities, towns, and in our schools, if
we cannot protect our young children, then we, as a people, are a disgrace.We are a disgrace to ourselves and to our
proud history.If we cannot secure the
lives of children whom we hold most dear, we are not a beacon to the world, we
are a failure, and we deserve the condemnation of countries around the globe.

In decades
past, we have faced mighty challenges from without, forces bent on our
destruction.We have been bloodied but
not beaten.The problem of gun violence,
however, is one of our own making, and being within our control, it ought to be
susceptible to solution.But the list of
mass killings has grown, they have become more frequent, and we remain
paralyzed.Places like Columbine,
Virginia Tech, Aurora emerge from obscurity and now live in infamy, and
somehow, nothing changes.

The
question now is whether Newtown will be simply added to the list, or whether
Americans will act, and act now, to prevent their children from being
massacred.If we do not act now, we will
never act.And while our children have,
for years, been killed one by one, in incidents so commonplace that the
newspapers often do not even notice, the choice of whether to live in fear, or
to do something about it, has never been so clear.

Are we so
enured to gun violence, are our hearts so hardened, that even this will not
awaken our consciences?In 1929, the
murder of seven Chicago mob associates on Valentine's Day was enough to spark
public outrage, and that outrage led to the downfall of Al Capone, whose
organization carried out the killings.There was a time when we cared, when we refused to live amid anarchy and
killing.We have to care enough now to
change, to change our hearts and our ways, to make it so that Newtown will
never happen again and children will not have to live in fear.

That is the
great task before us.We have before
faced and overcome greater tasks, but we cannot doubt that this is a moment of
reckoning for our country.The issue is
nothing less than whether the honored dead in Newtown will die in vain.Sympathy, prayers, and grief are not
enough.Killings like these must
stop.If the deaths of the Newtown kids
do not matter, then we as a country are dead inside too, and God have mercy on
us all.

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